MSI launches 8600 /8500 line

Micro-Star International showed some of these cards at CeBit, but now it's time for the official announcement.

MSI announced five cards in total, based on the 8500 GT, 8600 GT and 8600 GTS, and two out of the five ended up overclocked. They all have a 128-bit memory interface.

The cards based on the 8600 GTS are the NX8600GTS-T2D256E-HD-OC and the NX8600GTS-T2D256EZ-HD, both with HDCP support. Both of them have 32 stream processors, memory bandwidth of 32 GB/s, and texture fill rate of 10.8G Texels/sec.

The first one, as you can see from the model name is overclocked and works at 690 MHz for the core, 1450 MHz for the shaders and 2100 MHz for the GDDR3 memory. The second card is a passively cooled version and comes at default clocks of 675 MHz for the core, 1450 MHz for shaders, and 2000 MHz for the GDD3 memory.

Next in line are the 8600 GT models and again MSI has two of them. The model names are NX8600GT-T2D256EZ and NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC, the first one is passive and other one is actively cooled. And again they have 32 stream processors, memory bandwidth of 24GB/s, and texture fill rate of 8.6G Texels/sec.

The overclocked card ended up with 580 MHz for core unlike the passive cooled one with default 540 MHz for core. The GDDR3 memory had a slight bump up from 1400 MHz on non-oc:ed version, to 1600 MHz on the overclocked card. Shader clock speed is the same on both of them and ended up at 1190 MHz.

As for the 8500 GT, the model name is NX8500GT-TD256E. There are no released details on its specifications butit should end up with lower clocks and DDR2 memory.